Traditional manufacturing has relied upon subtractive approaches for forming components in desired geometries. These subtractive approaches involve removing a portion of an initial, raw material, and can utilize cutting and/or machining tools to form holes, surfaces, geometries, etc. in that material. More recently, additive manufacturing approaches have begun to emerge as suitable alternatives or replacements for the traditional subtractive approaches. Additive manufacturing (AM) includes adding individual layers of a material over one another to form a desired component geometry. Powder-based AM utilizes a heat source (e.g., a melting beam such as a laser beam or electron beam) to melt layers of a base material (e.g., a powdered metal) to form a desired geometry, layer-by-layer. The melting beam forms a melt pool in the base material, which subsequently solidifies. Next, another layer of base material is placed (e.g., spread) over the underlying layer and melted to that layer to build up the part. This process is repeated for a number of layers until the component geometry is formed.
The size and geometry of a part formed by AM is at least partially dictated by the ability of the melting beam to cover the component footprint. Multi-melting beam AM systems are often used to help manufacture more complex components, or to speed the process of manufacturing. However, these multi-melting beam AM systems typically over-load one or more of the melting beams while under-loading other melting beam(s). This load imbalance can be inefficient, causing delays in manufacturing and idleness for one or more melting beams in the system.